Menu

Too many choices

I just put my washing machine on and was thinking about how I only ever use one setting. Even if my life depended on it I don’t think I could be bothered finding out what the difference between all the settings is.

It made me think about how we have so many pointless choices to make these days, especially when shopping. I started remembering with nostalgia when I lived in Tunisia and got my groceries from a tiny dark shop with a counter that had an 150 year old man behind it. I would tell him what I wanted, eg shampoo and toothpaste (I would usually have to use mime as a means of communication. Toilet roll was always an interesting purchase), and he’d shuffle off to get it from his backroom store. No choice was required – there was only one kind of shampoo (he stocked Sunsilk for greasy hair, straight from 1985) and one kind of toothpaste (I have no idea what kind it was as the writing was in Arabic. My teeth didn’t fall out anyway).

At this point in my trip down memory lane I started to remember the frustration I used to feel when shopping in Tunisia, having to haggle over everything, and traipse from one shop to another for various goods. And that one time I went to the butcher to buy some chicken and he grabbed a live hen from a cage and chopped its head off on an upturned tree trunk right in front of me. I had to wait while he plucked and dissected it.

I’m now off to the supermarket and will reflect some more on the issue of choice as I try to select from the massive array of frozen chicken products. Is it better or worse than I don’t have to watch the bird being beheaded first?

Do we really need this many choices?

I feel duty bound to post links to my two books. If you can’t choose which you’d like to read, why not try both? LOL